They were crossing the Irish Sea. It was night, blowing a moderate gale, but the moon, aloft on the port bow with a wind, was chock full of such astounding brightness that the turmoil of the dark waves was easy and beautiful to see. The boat was crowded with soldiers on leave; the few civilian passengers—mechanics, labourers, and a miner going to his home in Wexford, who had got drunk at the harbour inn before coming aboard—were congregated in the angles on the lee-side of the saloon bunks and trying to sleep amid the chill seething, roaring, and thudding. The miner, young, powerful, and very much at his ease, sprawled among them intoxicated. He sang, and continued to sing at intervals, a song about “The hat that my father wore,” swaying, with large dreamy gestures, to and fro, round and about, up and down upon the unfortunate men sitting to right and left of him. Close at hand sat another young man, but smaller, who carried a big brass trumpet.
“Throw him in the sea, why not, now!” the trumpeter shouted to the drunken man’s weary supporters. “Begad I would do it if he put his pig’s face on e’er a shoulder of me!” He was a small, emphatic young man: “Give him a crack now, and lay on him, or by the tears of God we’ll get no repose at all!”
His advice was tendered as constantly and as insistently as the miner’s song about his parent’s headgear, and he would encourage these incitements to vicarious violence by putting the brass trumpet to his lips and blowing some bitter and not very accurate staves. So bitter and so inaccurate that at length even the drunken miner paused in his song and directed the trumpeter to “shut up.” The little man sprang to his feet in fury, and approaching the other he poured a succession of trumpet calls close into his face. This threw the miner into a deep sleep, a result so unexpected that the enraged trumpeter slung his instrument under his arm and pranced belligerently upon the deck.
“Come out o’ that, ye drunken matchbox, and by the Queen of Heaven I’ll teach ye! Come now!”
The miner momentarily raised himself and recommenced his song: “’Tis the Hat that me Father wore!” At this the trumpeter fetched him a mighty slap across the face.
“Ah, go away,” groaned the miner, “or I’ll be sick on ye.”
“Try it, ye rotten gossoon! ye filthy matchbox! Where’s yer kharkee?”
The miner could display no khaki; indeed, he was sleeping deeply again.
“I’m a man o’ me principles, ye rotten matchbox!” yelled the trumpeter. “In the Munsters I was ... seven years ... where’s your kharkee?”
He seized the miner by the collar and shook that part of the steamer into a new commotion until he was collared by the sailors and kicked up on to the foredeck.